Nicole Kluemper: ‘What are we if we are not our life experiences?’
Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Guardian

Nicole Kluemper’s home is filled with mementoes: navy medals, a collage of photographs, a portrait of her old dog. Every wedding anniversary has been carefully celebrated, most recently with a small bronzed statue, for eight years. From her bedroom window, she can see the hill where she and her husband married, and can recite every moment of the day. There is a reason for this careful archive. “My memory,” she says, “is a matter of some debate.”

In precise tones, Kluemper, 39, explains how she came to be part of one of the most controversial cases in modern psychology. This is the first time she has talked to the media about her story. For years, she was known only as Jane Doe.

“When I was about four, I accused my biological mother of sexually molesting me,” Kluemper says, sitting in the living room of her peaceful split-level home to the east of San Diego. “She and my father were in the process of getting a divorce. As part of the custody evaluation, a forensic evaluation was done.”

Her parents’ marriage had broken down within months of her birth, but the divorce had been brutal and long, with the battle for custody sprawling over years. In 1984, to create evidence for court hearings, a psychiatrist called David Corwin filmed interviews with Kluemper.

In the video, Kluemper, by then six, is playing with her crayons. Her dark, curly hair is held back by a pink ribbon, and her smile is missing a front tooth. Behind her are shelves of heavy legal textbooks. She looks into the video camera occasionally, articulate for a small child. It is only the words that are shocking: a small girl describing how her mother has sexually abused her.

As a result, Kluemper’s mother lost custody of her daughter. Kluemper went to live with her father and stepmother. Then, when she was 12, Kluemper’s father had a stroke and had to move to a convalescent home.

“At that point, since I didn’t have any family members to step in and take custody of me, I lived in several different state-run or private living situations,” Kluemper says. In fact, she was left with barely any family at all. Her mother had disappeared from her life, and she was not close to her half-brother. In one year, she moved eight times, ending up in an informal foster home with other kids.

There was one constant in the chaos: Corwin. With the assent of Kluemper and her father, Corwin was using the video of Kluemper as part of his training of fellow psychiatrists. He believed this recording was an unusually clear and effective illustration of a child explaining abuse. As a result, Corwin contacted Kluemper occasionally to ensure that she still consented to his use of the recordings.

But over the decades, Kluemper forgot what was actually on the videos. As time went by, she couldn’t remember any more why she didn’t see her mother. By the age of 16, Kluemper knew the videos existed and that they were being used as training aids, but no longer remembered what they contained.

Around the time that her father died, four years after his stroke, contact with her mother was re-established at the suggestion of Kluemper’s then foster mother.

“At that time, I didn’t remember any more why I had been taken from my biological mother’s custody,” Kluemper says. “And, as you can imagine, having a parent pass away at 16, anyone would be looking for something to grab hold of.”

But her mother’s erratic behaviour sparked questions, and Kluemper decided she had to see the videos. She contacted Corwin and asked if she could watch them.

The request created an ethical dilemma for Corwin. It seemed wrong to withhold the videos from Kluemper, but he couldn’t just send them to the by now 17-year-old and hope for the best. Eventually, they agreed that they should watch the videos together when he was next in California. Meticulous as always, Corwin filmed Kluemper consenting to watch the videos.

On the video, they discuss the situation and suddenly Kluemper appears to remember the abuse. In a few seconds, she goes from truculent teenager to broken child. There are differences between her description at six and her recall at 17. When she was six, she had referred to repeated assaults. In the later video, she recalls only one episode. At 17, she is less confident that it was deliberate abuse. “She was bathing me, and I only remember one instance, and she hurt me. She put her fingers too far where she shouldn’t have, and she hurt me,” she remembers on the video.

There is this moment of, where did that come from? It's like being slapped in the face

Today, Kluemper still looks bewildered at the surge of memories that overtook her so abruptly. “All of a sudden, I am like: ‘No, I do remember,’” Kluemper says now. “And there is this moment of: where did that come from? It’s almost like being slapped in the face when you’re not expecting it.”

Accidentally creating a video of someone apparently recalling sexual abuse was unprecedented. Once again, Kluemper granted Corwin permission to use her story, and he published an academic article carefully shielding his subject behind the pseudonym Jane Doe.

As Corwin wrote in his 1997 paper: “This case is unusual and perhaps unique in documentation; both the child’s disclosure at age six and the young woman’s sudden recall of the abuse at age 17 – after several years of reported inability to recall the experience – are preserved on video.”

Critically, it is almost impossible to “test” for this sort of memory recall. “For obvious ethical reasons, traumatic amnesia cannot be produced in controlled studies with human beings,” Corwin noted. “We cannot experiment on humans by raping, torturing, or bombarding them to verify in a laboratory setting that some percentage of human subjects will or will not develop amnesia.”

The paper’s publication in 1997 caused significant controversy in the world of psychiatry, upsetting long-held views. For most of the decade, a debate had raged between psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists over the existence of “repressed” memories. Known as the “memory wars” of the 1990s, the dispute was sparked in part by the case of an American man called George Franklin, who was accused by his daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Franklin-Lipsker’s childhood friend, Susan Nason, had been killed in 1969, and 20 years later, in 1989, she claimed to recover memories of her father’s alleged crime. Despite having no recall of this for two decades, she insisted she was reminded of the killing when she looked at her own young daughter.

Franklin was the first man to be jailed on the basis of a “recovered memory”, despite always insisting he was innocent. He was sentenced to life in jail in 1990, with the judge condemning the former firefighter as “wicked and depraved”. There followed a number of high-profile cases that seemed to support those psychiatrists who believed it was possible for children to recover memories of abuse years later. Others, however, including Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who testified on Franklin’s behalf, argued that there was no scientific evidence to support these “memories”. In 1996, amid doubts over his daughter’s testimony, Franklin was exonerated. Now, a year later, along came Corwin with what seemed to be video evidence supporting the existence of repressed memories.

For Kluemper, the second interview with Corwin had been an attempt to put the past behind her. She cut off contact with her mother and signed up for the US navy. She rose rapidly to become a helicopter pilot, a job that demanded extensive technical skills.

“The navy provided me with a structure I desperately needed,” she says. “And because I had a very, very difficult job to do, and because that job required that I compartmentalise these things that had happened to me, those were the times that I was given respite from the anger.”

I just thought this was very fishy. And the records began to convince me this mother was innocent. It was tragic

She operated from the naval base on Coronado Island, just off San Diego, and flew her helicopter for hundreds of hours over the course of her career. She was part of a counter-narcotics force off South America, and the search-and-rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina, hovering over the flooded houses of New Orleans during the desperate hunt for survivors. “In one house, a little girl wouldn’t leave without her cat,” she remembers. “We took the cat.”

She took pride in her job. “The navy was exciting. It gave me an identity when I was sorely lacking one. It was a good scaffold for rebuilding my life.”

But one day, she started hearing rumours of an investigation into her past. Inexplicably, a private investigator had turned up on the doorsteps of old friends. “As he left, he said: ‘Oh, tell Nicole that she needs to put air in her left front tyre.’ My car was parked up front, so he knew which car was mine. It was a sickening feeling, to know there was someone watching.”

A woman approached Kluemper’s half-brother, stepmother and biological mother, asking for details about Kluemper’s life. The same woman had apparently approached Kluemper’s foster mother, claiming to be Corwin’s boss. Thinking that she was talking to someone Kluemper knew and trusted, her foster mother spoke for several hours about Kluemper’s teenage years, saying that she sneaked out to meet boys and drink alcohol.

Kluemper’s biological mother, meanwhile, apparently told the woman that when she had tried to leave her husband, he had threatened her, saying that “he would take ‘Jane’ away from her and destroy her life”. She also said that Kluemper’s father “drank scotch in the way most people drink water”. Kluemper, who adored her father, insists this was simply not true.

At first, Kluemper couldn’t understand why anyone would be taking such an interest in her life. Then she realised it had to be something to do with Jane Doe.

***

Sitting in her office in the University of California, Irvine, Loftus speaks with the confidence of a woman at the end of a long and distinguished career. A photograph of her with Bill Clinton sits on the book-lined shelves. The only jarring note is a gun target pinned to the wall, complete with bullet holes. Now 72, Loftus studied for her first degree at UCLA and for her doctorate in psychology at Stanford. She worked her way up to a senior role at the University of Washington, before moving, in 2002, to Irvine.

Along the way, Loftus has carried out groundbreaking research into memory. Her famous “lost in the mall” study, in 1995, showed that if people were told they were lost in a shopping mall as a young child, many would subsequently “remember” the experience, and even embroider the memory. Another study showed that telling subjects they didn’t like certain foods could potentially help with obesity. “Or you could give them a negative memory of getting sick on an alcohol as a teenager, and then they’re not as interested in that alcohol,” she explains.

In Loftus’s mind, memory is like a Wikipedia page: anyone can add to it or, with the right factors, rewrite it. One of her key discoveries was proving that people will recall events differently, depending on how they are questioned, whether by a psychologist or a police officer.

As her stature grew, Loftus’s skills began being requested in court cases – including that of Franklin. By her own calculations, she has worked on 300 court cases over the past 40 years. It is a career that is both high-profile and lucrative. And it has put Loftus in the spotlight: the gun target on the wall comes from a time during the memory wars when she was getting so many threats, she decided she should learn to shoot. “These people – the repressed memory therapists, some of them, and the patients that they persuaded – they fight dirty,” she says.

But through it all, she has remained unconvinced by the science behind repressed memories. “There is no credible evidence for it,” she says, firmly. “Some day, we may be able to find it. But that you take this chunk of traumatic feelings and wall it off, and it resides there in some pristine form? It leaks and makes you do bad things and have symptoms, and you need to peel away this layer of repression? No.”

In 1993, the British Psychological Society convened a team to consider whether some psychologists might be accidentally implanting false memories of child sexual abuse in their clients. The following year, Loftus published one of her best-known books, The Myth Of Repressed Memory. Once she started looking at Kluemper’s case more closely, she became convinced that her mother had been falsely accused. “I just thought this was very fishy,” she says. “I was able to find the identity of Jane Doe. And once I could find the name, I could get into the divorce file, and find the records that began to convince me this mother was innocent. It was tragic.”

Loftus came across details that Corwin had not included in his paper, and concluded that Kluemper’s mother was the innocent victim, financially outgunned by the older and more sophisticated father. “They were separated from the time she was eight months old,” Loftus says. “They fought and fought until the sex abuse case got solidified and the mother lost the fight.” Loftus hypothesised that someone else had put the thoughts of abuse into Kluemper’s mind.

Loftus made contact with Kluemper’s mother, who insisted she was innocent. “She was so grateful that someone finally believed her,” Loftus says now.

I spoke to Kluemper’s mother on the telephone, and she said she was still grateful for Loftus’s assistance, and that her life had been destroyed by the allegations of sexual abuse, which she says are false. “It was a nightmare that went on for a long time. It completely destroyed me. My kids are everything to me and they always came first.”

But defending Kluemper’s mother was not Loftus’s only motivation. She was also concerned about Corwin’s use of the videos: “He was showing her videotapes publicly, he wrote a big article in which he had extensive excerpts.” Loftus believed it was vital to subject Corwin’s thesis to scientific scrutiny. “I felt that the Jane Doe case was doing harm. It was being used and introduced in other cases as proof that repressed memories were real – and used against other people that I would bet my house were innocent.”

***

Unfortunately, to prove Corwin wrong, Loftus had to shine further light on Kluemper’s past. As the psychologist continued to dig, Corwin worked out who was behind the investigation. Horrified by the intrusion, in 1998, Kluemper tried to bring it to a halt.

“I asked her to stop,” Kluemper says. “She didn’t stop. At that time, Elizabeth Loftus was at the University of Washington. I went to the University of Washington, the ethical use of human subjects committee, and I asked them to review what she had done.”

The University of Washington put Loftus under investigation, but she was cleared of any wrongdoing. She left the university, but continued to investigate the case. In 2002, now at Irvine, she published an article.

I lost the ability to trust. It was like someone threw a brick through the front of my life and it shattered around me

Kluemper remembers vividly the day Loftus published her article concluding it was likely that Jane Doe had never been sexually abused. “I can only describe it as you’re standing in your home town, where people definitely know you, and this giant hand comes down and grabs you by the back of the neck, rips all your clothes off and then puts you right back down completely naked, for everyone you know and care about to stare at you. Parts of you that you don’t want anyone to see.”

Although Loftus had not directly named her, Kluemper believed it was possible to identify her through the article. News organisations take particular care when reporting on the victims of sexual abuse to ensure that they cannot be identified by jigsaw identification, which is when pieces of information fit together to identify a victim. Loftus, by contrast, set out all the steps she had taken to ascertain Jane Doe’s identity, and included several details about the family.

Though Loftus still maintains it was not possible to identify Jane Doe, Kluemper says: “It felt like the most incredible invasion. I lost the ability to trust people. I am still trying to get that back completely. It was like someone threw a brick through the front of my life, and it shattered around me.” In approaching her biological mother, stepmother and foster mother, Kluemper felt that Loftus had targeted the three women in her life who should have been protecting her. Furious, she approached the American Psychological Association, but Loftus had resigned from the organisation, so there was no recourse there.

Kluemper decided to sue. The suit went through two rounds of court. Several of her claims were struck out, but it was decided that the court could examine the argument that Loftus had misrepresented herself when talking to Kluemper’s foster mother. Loftus insists that she did not misrepresent herself, but the two sides ended up settling, with Loftus’s insurance making a small payout. However, under California’s anti-Slapp laws (strategic lawsuit against public participation, to stop groundless lawsuits), and because several of her claims were struck out, Kluemper was hit with $250,000 in legal costs.

Today, Loftus says she regrets the financial crisis that engulfed Kluemper. “I had a phone conversation when I tried to warn her. She may not remember that part of the conversation.”

The costs were unpayable for Kluemper, and her navy advisers recommended that she declare bankruptcy. That meant leaving the navy. Once again, Kluemper found her life collapsing.

***

Even now, two decades later, Corwin is horrified by the sequence of events unleashed by his report into the Jane Doe case. Speaking from the University of Utah, where he now works, Corwin says he was extremely careful only to report the bare facts. “I wasn’t an extremist in the memory wars,” he says. “I am a forensic child psychiatrist and I have seen all kinds of different cases. We never used the words ‘repressed memory’. We tried to describe the phenomenon objectively, without theoretical implications.”

Before publishing the paper, and with Kluemper’s consent, he invited people “from across the spectrum” to review the videos – including “people who had a lot of scepticism about whether this was even possible. We didn’t attempt to slant it. We thought it was useful at the time just to illustrate that this in fact happened”.

He always recognised the conflict in treating a six-year-old as evidence, but points out that from Sigmund Freud onwards, psychiatry has depended on case reports. “You couldn’t plan it. It just happened,” Corwin says. “The main concern here is, what does this mean for science? What does it mean for publication? Case reports have been a cornerstone of the evolution of medical and psychiatric knowledge, and development.” He is worried that what happened to Kluemper has affected their use. “From the scientists’ professional perspective, there are probably some who are more wary of publishing case reports, because of fear.”

He says he remains confused by Loftus’s actions. “She phoned me to tell me it was about to be published, and by then it was too late to do anything,” he says carefully. “Then I read it, and in my view there were many, many inaccuracies.”

He remains close to Kluemper, speaking to her regularly. For her part, she is now able to laugh at the psychiatrist’s guilt. “I’ve said to him: ‘In all seriousness, Dave, you’ve got to let it go.’ And I don’t know if he can.” She believes it was the detail of Corwin’s science – and the publicity it received – that motivated Loftus; that if she couldn’t question the science, she had to throw doubt over his subject. “In my opinion, she did it because she was starting to get questions about the Jane Doe case when she was testifying as an expert witness, and it was starting to be problematic for her,” Kluemper says. “I think it was affecting her livelihood.”

Meanwhile, Kluemper was bankrupt and unemployed. The navy, with its sense of belonging and achievement, was gone. “I was angry,” she says. “I spent a number of years being angry.” Salvation came from an unexpected direction. Despite the trauma, Kluemper had been inspired by her interaction with the psychiatrist.

“What I remembered of David Corwin was that he was somebody who just wanted to hear what I had to say. Because, in a divorce situation, both parents have their own agenda. But I distinctly remember, even at five years old, that Dave Corwin was only interested in what I had to say. I wanted to do what he did.”

So Kluemper started again. She trained as a psychologist, and today works at a non-profit healthcare centre in Linda Vista, San Diego. She is routinely the first contact children ever have with mental health services. “It’s like someone took a snowglobe and shook it up, and now their world is in freefall. So, to be able to stand with them until everything settles down and then watch them go back to the world not as victims, but as survivors; to be able to watch them go back to the business of being a seven-year-old or a 17-year-old – that is what makes it worthwhile to me.”

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Today, Kluemper is glad she returned to Corwin. “If I hadn’t gone back and watched those videos at 17… It did in the end bring the pieces of my life together in a way that nothing else could have. I didn’t appreciate it for years.” But she is no longer confident about what happened all those years ago. “There are days when I think I was molested by my biological mother and there are days I am fairly convinced it didn’t happen. It is a very difficult way to live. More days, I am convinced it is true... It feels like someone just took an eraser, sort of, and smudged my life.”

Though she is now content, living with her husband in southern California, Kluemper retains a sense of outrage over what she feels was Loftus’s intrusion into her privacy. She empathises with rape victims who have their memories questioned on the witness stand.

She has been moved by the recent Bill Cosby case, in which the entertainer was accused of aggravated indecent assault. Dozens of women have come forward to speak about memories of his attacks, which Cosby denies, but almost all are time-barred by the statute of limitations. “I’m not sure if there is a more significant sense of outrage than that of having your own memories challenged,” Kluemper wrote in an early email exchange. “I was indignant, and I would imagine these women feel similarly.”

Loftus was involved in the defence on the Cosby case, which will be retried in November, and it was partly this that inspired Kluemper to speak out about her distress in the aftermath of the Jane Doe case. “What are we if we are not our life experiences?” Kluemper asks. “If we are to believe that those memories are as fallible as some researchers want us to believe they are, what does that leave us with? What are we doing here?”